Crews rescue ailing mariner from Portuguese trawler off Newfoundland
A mariner who was reported as being in medical distress was airlifted this weekend from a Portuguese vessel, video released by the Joint Rescue Coordination Centre shows.
Search and rescue technicians with the Royal Canadian Air Force conducted the medical evacuation about 200 nautical miles off the coast of St. John's.
Video tweeted by the Joint Rescue Coordination Centre late Monday night shows crews dealing with swells of four to five metres, as they rescue a man from a 250-foot vessel on Saturday.
Maj. Mark Norris, the officer in charge of the JRCC in Halifax, says the centre first got a call from a rescue centre in Lisbon on Friday evening.
The Lisbon centre was tracking a Portuguese commercial trawler with a crew member in medical distress.
His symptoms stabilized, and a rescue coordination centre in Boston asked the boat to head toward St. John's, which was the nearest port.
Eventually a Cormorant helicopter from 103 Squadron currently stationed in St. John's, and a Hercules aircraft from Greenwood, N.S., were sent on a medevac mission when the man's condition worsened.
Norris says things went well, despite the swells.
"All the medevacs that we typically conduct have some element of risk involved in them, given the distances and the challenging North Atlantic," he told CBC News.
"In this case, we had some favourable [conditions] — we had daytime, which is significant. We had a larger vessel, and the team went out and executed the mission and everything worked out. So, all in all, a positive outcome for us."
The man was safely transferred in St. John's to a waiting ambulance.
